It is a story that has gone down in the annals of American art history: a New Yorker visiting upstate Hoosick Falls is entranced by four pictures hanging in the window of a drugstore. Investigating further, he learns they are the handiwork of a 78-year-old widow. Thus begins the rise to fame of Grandma Moses—farmwife, painter, and unlikely celebrity.

In this book Karal Ann Marling, distinguished observer of American visual culture, looks at Grandma Moses as a cultural phenomenon of the postwar period and explores the meaning of her subject matter—and her astonishing fame. What did the “Greatest Generation” see in her simple renderings of people, young and old, tapping maple trees for syrup, making apple butter, gliding across snowy fields on sleighs? Why did Bob Hope, Irving Berlin, and Harry Truman all love her—and the art czars of New York openly despise her? Through the flood of Moses merchandise—splashed across Christmas cards, dishware, yard goods, and gewgaws of every kind—Marling traces the resonances that these “primitive” images struck in an America awkwardly adjusting to a new era of technology, suburbia, and Cold War tensions.

Between the cultural ephemera, folklore, song, and history embedded in Moses’s paintings and the potent advertising shorthand for Americana that her images rapidly became, this book reveals the widespread longing for the memories, comforts, and small victories of a mythic, intimate American past tapped by the phenomenon—in art and commerce alike—of Grandma Moses.

George Washington: Revolutionary general, Father of His Country, first president, authentic hero, prime mover in establishing a constitutional government, squire of Mount Vernon, itself a national shrine. The sheer ubiquity of his persona makes him an excellent focus for understanding how Americans from the centennial of the nation's birth to the present have rediscovered their colonial origins and have manipulated what they found for a variety of social, economic, and political purposes. The more modern we become, says Karal Ann Marling, the more desperately we cling to our Washingtons, to our old-fashioned heroes, to an imaginary lost paradise chock-full of colonial furniture.

Marling has pursued the figure of Washington from flea markets to World's Fairs in order to understand his significance in American culture and iconography. Of all American heroes, she points out, Washington is the one most closely tied to artifacts, relics, material possessions, style. She describes the Philadelphia Centennial Exposition of 1876, where the federal government exhibited a scene of camp life at Valley Forge, complete with Washington's coat, pants, and other personal objects that lent a strong domestic flavor to the nascent colonial revival. When the restoration of Mount Vernon was begun in the late nineteenth century, it was financed and directed by women, as was much of the historic preservation of the period. Thanks to these efforts, the American home became the scene of successive waves of a revivalism that is still very alive in the 1980s.

In describing Washington's talismanic importance, Marling shows the efforts of twentieth-century politicians to co-opt his incorruptible image. When Harding wanted to convince Americans of his reliability and probity, he campaigned from the Colonial Revival porch of his house on Mount Vernon Avenue in Marion, Ohio. The Washington image was mined for the campaigns that celebrated Calvin Coolidge's Puritan simplicity and Herbert Hoover's engineering talents, said to be related to George Washington's career as a surveyor; more recently, Ronald Reagan at his second inaugural invoked the vision of the humble general praying in the snow at Valley Forge. The neutral and flexible Washington became whatever people wanted him to be—the decorators' darling, the doyen of the D.A.R., the model citizen held up as an example to unruly children and immigrants.

But Marling's book is about more than George Washington and the different ways in which Americans have made use of their past. In her quest for the unhistorical George, Marling has examined the subculture of American life—magazine fiction, historical romances, movies (both silent and talking), and journalism. She traces the descent of high art into such popular forms as posters, plaques, packages, and billboards, all to illuminate how Washington's iconic meaning has influenced styles and tastes on many levels.

In the split second that it took Associated Press photographer Joe Rosenthal to snap the shutter of his Speed Graphic, a powerful and enduring American symbol was born. Iwo Jima: Monuments, Memories, and the American Hero tells the story of that icon as it appeared over the next forty years in bond drive posters, stamps, Hollywood movies, political cartoons, and sculpture, most notably the colossal Marine Corps War Memorial outside Washington, D.C. The book is also a brilliant and moving study of the soldiers who fought one of our bloodiest battles and of the impact of Iwo Jima on the rest of their lives.

When the famous photograph first appeared in newspapers in 1945 it was little more than a grainy outline of massed men and their wafting flag, but for millions it captured the essence of American grit and determination. The Marines pictured were in fact in no immediate danger—they were replacing a small flag planted earlier atop Mt. Suribachi with a larger, more visible one—but to an enthusiastic public they were heroes risking their lives for Old Glory. The Battle of Iwo Jima raged for many days beyond the capture of this one position, and ultimately claimed the lives of almost seven thousand American servicemen, yet already the tableau symbolized victory and, as a politician said at the time, “the dauntless permanency of the American spirit.”

With passion and meticulous care Karal Ann Marling and John Wetenhall illuminate the ironies and misconceptions that proliferated around the two Iwo Jima flag raisings. Pride and nostalgia exalted the glorious epiphany of Rosenthal’s image and suppressed the grisly and at times mundane reality of war. The ordinary men whose action had been immortalized became uneasy celebrities, while the planters of the first flag were doomed to oblivion. From John Wayne’s epic Sands of Iwo Jima to the gargantuan bronze boots of the War Memorial to the parade-floats of Mt. Suribachi done in sweet peas and orchid-colored pompoms, overwrought patriotism blended with true valor.

The authors weave a fast-paced and vivid story from the reminiscences of survivors, rare archival sources, and dozens of documentary photographs. They give the first comprehensive account of the building of the Marine Corps War Memorial, dedicated in 1954. And in a riveting final chapter they follow a group of American veterans who returned to the island in 1985 and met Japanese survivors. Dedicated to the men who fought on Iwo Jima, this groundbreaking study in cultural iconography transcends the icon to show the honor in remembering what really happened.

It wouldn't be Christmas without the "things." How they came to mean so much, and to play such a prominent role in America's central holiday, is the tale told in this delightful and edifying book. In a style characteristically engaging and erudite, Karal Ann Marling, one of our most trenchant observers of American culture, describes the outsize spectacle that Christmas has become, showing us the provenance and significance of each of its essential parts: the decorated trees and holiday lights, the cards and gifts and wrapping papers, the toy villages and store displays and Macy's holiday parade, Bing Crosby and Santa Claus.

Viewing Christmas through the media of mass culture--engravings and lithographs, magazine fiction, pictorial ads, news photos, cards, and movies--Marling tells us how the beloved Christmas tree grew out of a much-reprinted image of Queen Victoria and her family gathered around a decorated fir; how Santa Claus lost his provincial Dutch character and turned into the jolly old soul we know; how Charles Dickens's A Christmas Carol borrowed from Washington Irving's imaginings of what Christmas must have been like in Merrie Olde England; and how the holiday, balancing between the private and public realms, conferred a central and defining role on women.

A celebration of the visual culture of the season, Merry Christmas! offers captivating evidence that Christmas in America is primarily a secular celebration of abundance, goodwill, and familial identity, expressed in a multitude of material ways.